1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to handheld electronic devices, and more particularly, to a method and system for inputting different languages among one or more applications, such as a text input application, run by the handheld electronic device.
2. Background Information
Handheld electronic devices are becoming ubiquitous. Examples include, for instance, personal data assistants (PDAs), handheld computers, two-way pagers, cellular telephones, text messaging devices, and the like. Many of these handheld electronic devices incorporate wireless communications, although others are stand-alone devices that do not communicate with other devices.
As these handheld electronic devices have become more popular, there has been a growing demand for more functionality and sophistication. While it has been common to provide multiple functions, such as an address book, spell check and text input, the latter especially has become more complex. This is due at least partially to the trend to make these handheld electronic devices smaller and lighter in weight. A limitation in making them smaller has been the physical size of the keyboard if the keys are to be actuated directly by human fingers. Generally, there have been two approaches to solving this problem. One is to adapt the ten digit keypad indigenous to mobile phones for text input. This requires each key to support input of multiple characters. The second approach seeks to shrink the traditional full keyboard, such as the “qwerty” keyboard, by doubling up characters to reduce the number of keys. In both cases, the input generated by actuation of a key representing multiple characters is ambiguous. Various schemes have been devised to interpret inputs from these multi-character keys. Some schemes require actuation of the key a specific number of times to identify the desired character. Others use software to progressively narrow the possible combinations of letters that could be intended by a specified sequence of keystrokes. This approach uses multiple lists that can contain, for instance, prefixes, generic words, learned words, and the like.
Typically, the various applications have had their own database or databases upon which they draw. Thus, the address book application had its own list of addresses used only for that application, the spell check application had its own database of words, and while the text application could have multiple lists (e.g., word lists; prefix lists; n-gram lists; learning lists) of a particular single language, those lists were only used by that text application. This can lead to duplication of data and an inefficient use of memory, which limits the ability to reduce the size, weight and energy use of the handheld electronic device.
The problem of disambiguation of the text input is even larger when the input might be desired in a number of different languages, such as, for example, English/French or English/Spanish. Switching between the languages to input the words in that language is bulky. Also, the space requirements for the device are higher.
There is room for improvement in systems and methods for multilanguage text input in a handheld electronic device.